With a critical essay by Cédric Fauq, Capc's chief curator, and an interview with the artist by Anne Fricke, curator at Essen's Museum Folkwang, the publication examines the artist's methods and approach, and offers a rich visual panorama of Olu Ogunnaike's two exhibitions, Miettes at the Capc musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux in 2022, and I'd Rather Stand at the Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2021-2022.
Taking trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow, Olu Ogunnaike (born 1986 in London) cites wood (material that he works in all its forms, from sawdust to charcoal along with resin) as a marker of possible encounters: between past and present; between people and the spaces they inhabit. He is interested in the parallels that can be drawn between humans and trees, tracing the moment a tree is uprooted from one geographical setting and placed in another, where it might be transformed. This story—of the composite and accumulative nature of our identities—is inextricably linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange.
